ESPN2 to feature Siena walk-on Smith

Just-in’Love Smith, the former HVCC player now a 26-year-old walk-on senior at Siena, will be featured on ESPN2’s “First Take” Thursday morning according to Siena officials. The segment is slated to air shortly after 11 a.m.

There had to be a really good reason for a national show to do a feature on a mid-major walk-on. With Smith, there is one.

If you are not familiar with Smith, read my column on him from 2007. This is just a class individual who will help the Saints greatly this season, even if he doesn’t see meaningful minutes on the floor.

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Times Union, The (Albany, NY) – Sunday, October 28, 2007

Author/Byline: Mark McGuireEdition: 1Section: SportsPage: C1

TROY – Athletes come to Hudson Valley Community College for a reason.

Some have to work on their grades, or their game. Cash for a four-year college tuition can be a factor, or a desire to stay close to home.

Some screwed up. Some didn’t.

Many just have to mature. It comes with time. And they don’t get a lot of it at a two-year school. As sophomore basketball co-captain Justin Gallo said, “You gotta find yourself sooner” than at a four-year college.

Just-IN’Love Smith , a sophomore point guard, brings maturity with him to this year’s team. He’s the player others look up to. He’s the leader who looks out for them.

Smith ‘s the one who helps the freshmen and the sophomores with problems on and off the court. He’s the rah-rah guy, a 5-foot-10, 190-pound tough guy who’s a shut-down defender coming off the bench. Smith leads by example, and certainly experience.

The California native brings the experience of games and gangs and war and a devastating injury.

The experience of being shot at on the streets of Sacramento, and the streets of Mosul, Iraq .

Of dealing with the aftermath of war, the anger and fitful nights.

Smith ‘s experience comes from burying his mom, dead from asthma, when he was a fifth-grader, and later moving across the country with his older sister and brother-in-law to East Greenbush. It comes from leading kids on the basketball court, and men and women in a combat zone.

It comes with age. His freshman teammates were in eighth grade when Smith last suited up for the Vikings. Just-IN’Love Smith – he went by just Justin when he played at Columbia High – is 24, an Iraq War veteran, a co-captain.

Smith recalls in detail how he and his cousins got shot at one night in Sacramento. The older cousins, mixed up in gangs, were targeted. Smith was a ninth-grader.

Ebony and Elton Fortson, an Army sergeant and recruiter, took Smith in. After a year in Barstow, Calif., the family moved to East Greenbush. Smith didn’t want to go.

Too bad. His sister and brother-in-law wanted him to get a good education. Just-IN’Love muddled through school, played on good Columbia teams that featured future Syracuse starter Craig Forth, and got a degree.

But he was adrift, uncertain in himself, what to do. After graduating, Smith figured he’d go to HVCC ; at least he could play hoops. He averaged 8.6 points a game starting as an off guard his freshman season. But he still didn’t have a game plan.

“I didn’t know which way I wanted to go in life,” Smith said. “I had no goals. I had no direction. I knew what my brother (-in-law) did, and he was doing fine. …”

So he enlisted in the Army in the summer of 2003. For two years, the supply specialist shivered in Fairbanks, Alaska. “Too cold,” Smith said. “Way too cold.” His next stop, in 2005, proved to be one of the hot spots of the Iraq War: Mosul.

From October 2005 to August 2006, Smith served as a gunner on an armored personnel carrier escorting convoys through the city streets. He also drove periodic missions ferrying personnel. Twice his convoy came under attack by IEDs, the deadly roadside bombs made infamous by this war. Three times he came under small arms fire.

“Every time you got to go out,” he said, “you knew you may not come back.”

Being on the line with under two minutes to go in a tight game? Cramming for a final exam? Making sure bills are paid? No, no, no: Driving in a convoy through Iraq is pressure.

“It’s easy for the guys to look up to him,” head coach Andre Cook said. “He’s been in Iraq . He’s had many life experiences.”

To this day, Smith simply can’t drive over a pothole, even on the streets of Troy. Insurgents in Iraq used potholes as cover for bombs, so Smith became trained at swerving around them. He still does, without thinking.

You bring stuff like that back with you. Then there’s his messed-up hand. The injury came in a fall off a personnel vehicle; two torn ligaments and a broken bone in his left wrist that required surgery and pins.

More than a year later, the right-hander still can’t fully bend the wrist. “It hurts when I play basketball,” he said. But it got him out of push-ups in his last year of service, which was good.

Smith returned to the States, and eventually finished his hitch in Alaska. Discharged from the Army as a corporal, Smith came back to Troy. He enlisted in the National Guard, and re-enrolled at HVCC . “I wanted to play another year at Hudson Valley to get the basketball out of me,” he said. He hopes to soon take the state troopers’ exam.

The guy who’s always propping up the spirits of his teammates, sometimes acting younger than they do, had his dark moments after coming home. His longtime girlfriend, Arsiema Donnelly, noticed that Smith seemed to get more angry at little things. He wasn’t sleeping right. Smith saw it too, acknowledging the problem before it could spiral. Polite and easy to smile, Smith has anger issues under control. He still does stay up at night sometimes.

Smith shares his experience with teammates more by deed than words, by working hard on his studies and offering younger players a place to crash in Troy and by busting himself on the court and the classroom. He wished he worked harder as a kid himself. That’s the kind of thing you learn with time.

But he does not present himself as some grizzled purveyor of all knowledge, certainly not just because he’s older. Wisdom and maturity don’t just come from age.